Case studies evaluating the quality of synthetic environments

Multi wall stereo projection systems (MWSP) are an emerging display paradigm, promising a new quality in 3D-real-time interactions. Not much is known about the ergonomics of these systems. In this paper some basics of perception and approaches to improve the visual quality will be discussed and results of four experiments will be presented in order to obtain a better understanding of user interactions with existing projection technology. Due to the limited number of participants the experiments are considered as case-studies only. The first task was the estimation of absolute geometrical dimensions of simple objects. The second task was grabbing simple objects of different sizes. In order to classify MWSP, these tasks were compared to other display devices and compared to physical reality. We conducted two further experiments to compare different viewing devices for virtual reality (VR) like Head Mounted Displays (HMD), monitor, and the MWSP. For all of those experiments quantitative data was collected as a measure of interaction quality. The last two tests were supported by pre- and post questionnaires to obtain subjective judgement of the displays as well.